THEATRE REVIEW: CLYBOURNE PARK



Pictured: Jeff Lillico, Sterling Jarvis, Maria Ricossa, Audrey Dwyer

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
21 FEB 2013
R: 3.5/5

TORONTO - It may be a Chicago suburb, but Toronto audiences have spent a lot of time in CLYBOURNE PARK nonetheless. First, in 2008, Soulpepper mounted a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s iconic race drama, A Raisin in the Sun, set in the sometimes-troubled inner-city area of the windy city, reviving it in 2010. Then last year, Studio 180 teamed with Canadian Stage to visit the same locale in Bruce Norris’ CLYBOURNE PARK — a more recent play set in the same home in which Hansberry’s Raisin unfolds, and playing out in the days immediately preceding Raisin and a half-century after it.


But while the setting for both plays is same, the focus isn’t, for where Hansberry plumbed racial tensions festering in Shytown, Norris splits his focus, exploring other American values as well, the most important of which would seem be the value of American real estate. And now, CLYBOURNE PARK is back, with a revival of Studio 180’s production that opened on the stage of the Panasonic Tuesday, the latest entry in the off-Mirvish season.


Featuring the same cast, this is, nonetheless, a somewhat larger affair, featuring a subtly expanded version of Michael Gianfrancesco’s set design, originally created for the more intimate Berkeley Street space in which it was originally mounted. And it’s not just the set that’s bigger, with almost everyone in the cast tackling their double casting with a renewed relish, eager, it seems, to finally embrace the warts with which the playwright has imbued his characters.


But as they set about inhabiting the two eras in which the play is set — the white-dominated middle class period of the late ’50s and a more contemporary middle class era where prejudices are more closely held and guarded — they lose their way. Under the direction of Joel Greenberg, most of the seven-member cast go completely over the top, creating caricatures of racism and greed, where the script demands characters simply flawed by racism and greed instead.


While Michael Healey tackles both his roles with the kind of over-embroidered enthusiasm we’ve grown to expect, Jeff Lillico, Mark McGrinder, Kimwun Perehinec and, to a lesser degree, Audrey Dwyer seem so eager to demonstrate the range of their acting abilities that their thespian aspirations overshadow the demands of character and balance. Pity is, all they really had to do was look to performances crafted by Maria Ricossa and Sterling Jarvis, both of whom manage to create well-rounded characters whose good hearts and humanity are balanced in some degree by the racial and financial exigencies of life in Clybourne Park.


In his first go at this script, Greenberg seemed to encourage his cast to sidestep the uniquely American issues the play explores. This time out, he has allowed them to embrace those issues with a vengeance that ultimately unbalances things. The perfect production of CLYBOURNE PARK, one suspects, would be about half-way between those two extremes — and probably about 850 km to the southwest.